This blog continues to share ideas and hopes to generate discussion on social business, knowledge management, and emerging technologies. It also increasingly covers my home, New Orleans, my painting, and travels.

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January 31, 2009

As stated in Facebook, as part of the new exhibition programme for 2009, Surface Gallery sees the first curated exhibition; ‘Particles, Particles’ within its new venue. The show consists of a diverse range of media; from painting and sculpture to performance and installation, featuring an array of international artists, brought together from Italy, Norway, Japan and the UK. The gallery is located at 16 Southwell Road, Nottingham, UK. Wish I could be there.

The exhibition projects an ambitious light on the range of skills and values present in an artist’s capabilities today, and the intensity of one’s own intellect. A nostalgic, almost surreal presence floats over the “particles” foundations, with something we can all relate to - yet at times it is unclear just where we felt those sensations at a previous moment, or how close to us those moments are.

Christina Bryant will be performing exclusively at the Surface Gallery for the private view. She will be responding spontaneously to the audience in her role as ‘the drawer’ (in which she will be situated within a white cube), inviting, through the action of a live drawing, the audience to literally be drawn into the piece. The Norwegian artist Tone Holmen considers the impact of consumption in relation to climate change. Through transforming non-degradable materials into sculptures of poignant meaning, she addresses key issues that are relevant to us all. Sam Clift explores the visual perception and connotations of materials once they are taken out of their original context; transforming them into an altered state quite different from the source. Japanese artist Yuko Takemura’s interactive installation explores the inner mind of one’s self, through interacting with the viewer’s senses; it evokes recollections of thoughts, daydreams and past times.

To celebrate the opening of the exhibition, Surface Gallery are collaborating with Brass Monkey cocktail bar to host the after party at their venue in the Lace Market, from 9pm onwards. They will also kindly be providing drinks at the opening of ‘Particles, Particles’, whilst Edin's Deli Café have generously contributed to publicity costs.

The Private View will be held on the 6th February 6-9pm, where you will be able to come along to view the work and meet participating artists whilst also having the opportunity to partake in a live performance!

January 30, 2009

I recently got a link to an interesting video as a comment on an AppGap post I did on Radian6 – see Radian6 – Monitoring Social Media. The link went to a video on VizEdu, a blog sponsored by Telezent. The blog states that its “objective is to explain Social Media, Web2.0, Search and Emerging technologies visually. We make learning visual, fun, simple and actionable. In this blog we have a “Zero Text” policy. We use interactive Flash, videos, pictures and presentations to only.”

This video was on social media monitoring and it nicely lustrated a number of adverse case studies on such products as Microsoft Internet Explorer, Taco Bell, Hitachi, It sows that brands had better be listening to what is being said about them on the web. There are consumer vigilantes out there armed with video cameras, and other devices and now empowered by social media so that potentially millions can see their rants. This is a topic I have covered before (see Customer Service Still Matters - Even More Than Ever and Online Customer Experience – What is Going On? As well as the Radian6 post above). It is nice to see this video.

January 29, 2009

I have visited Novell and written about they use wikis within their own enterprise (see Making Wikis Work at Novell) So I was interested when they approached me about a new product in the enterprise 2.0 space. I spoke with Wendy Steinle – Director of Product Marketing at Novell, Alex Evans – Product Manager, Groupwise, and Travis Grandpre – Product Marketing Manager about GroupWise® 8, their cross-platform e-mail and calendaring solution. I have With support for Windows, Linux, Mac, and the Web, GroupWise 8 gives customers a personal productivity solution at a low total cost of ownership. It offers a customizable dashboard that allows users to interact with traditional tools such as e-mail, calendar, contacts and task lists, as well as leverage popular Web 2.0-enabled team workspaces, blogs, RSS feeds and applications.

People are still wedded to email for many communication and collaboration functions. GroupWise 8 provides a means to connect traditional tools such as email with enterprise 2.0 applications. It allows you to have access to multiple applications through a single interface. It looks at four main aspects of personal productivity: time management, task management, contact management, and interaction with enterprise 2.0 collaboration tools. These are all exposed through the Home Views as seen in the screen shot below.

GroupWise 8 acts like a mashup but in a Windows, Linux, or Mac client. You can customize the interface with multiple columns to include as much or as little as you want. As we discussed, this is a completely different approach than I find on my Mac desktop where email, calendaring, and contact management are all in separate applications that are opened in individual windows. The Novell team pointed out that going back and forth between all these separate windows can result in confusion and extra time finding the right app. I would not disagree based on my own experience. The addition of web panels brings in the Web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 world. You can maximize or minimize each of the panels within the desktop by double clicking on the header. You can also create multiple home views – each customized for maximum productivity for different projects, roles, etc. (e.g. a home view for primary job responsibility, a home view for a particular trip or project, a home view for personal needs, etc.).

The calendar function allows you to reach outside the enterprise to check the calendars of anyone operating a calendar open to “busy checking.” Novell uses the Apple iCal protocol for this and it works with Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, and Google gmail but ironically not iCal at this point. Alex mentioned that the Danish government recently spent about $800,000 (US) to “busy check” enable across their various calendar applications and reported that this saved them cost savings on over $10,000,000 (US). This feature is now available out of the box with Groupwise 8. See screen shot below.

The GroupWise 8 task management feature allows you to drag and drop items from email into a personal task management function. You can then create parent and child relationships between tasks and have multiple layer hierarchies. This capability will integrate with tools such as Microsoft project and many of the enterprise 2.0 project management tools that have open APIs. You can also launch these tools within the GroupWise 8 workspace. It also works with Novell’s own Teaming + Conferencing application that includes blogs and wikis.

The contact management allows users to embed relevant information like maps, photos and personal details into the contact file, providing a single location to help track, manage and build their business relationships. It also allows you to browse by photos, a nice feature. And, within a contact, you can see all communications with that person and add your own notes so your discussion history and next steps are at your fingertips. You can also search across components within the suite.See the screen shot below.

GroupWise 8 supports hundreds of mobile devices, including iPhone, BlackBerry and Palm. See the Novell site on GroupWise for more details. It looks like a very useful package that serves as a connection between old school communication and collaboration tools and enterprise 2.0

January 28, 2009

Sonoa ServiceNet is a network and virtual appliance that supports enterprise cloud computing by enforcing security, interoperability, and performance policies. I spoke with Scott Regan, their head of marketing. The use of cloud computing is exploding, in part because of the huge potential cost savings. Many firms are considering working within the cloud but the three issues raised above are often obstacles. Sonoa is designed to address these potential road blocks to enterprise cloud computing. It actually began to support SOA within the enterprise but branched out to the cloud as the popularity of SaaS emerged.

Sonoa addresses several main SaaS issues. First, it allows for visibility to SaaS traffic and performance. This allows for monitoring of policies and compliance issues. This data can help with both governance and performance management issues. Here is a screen shot of Sonoa Analytics.

Second it enables enhanced security and access control. You can implement a flexible, access control policy model that can be applied on global operations down to individual users or clients. There is also a rich set of policies for authentication, authorization, auditing, privacy, and data protection. A user model for collaboration, user isolation, and delegated administration is provided and profile-based policies can be applied to LDAP, databases, or other existing resources.

Third, ServiceNet enables transformation of application through protocol mapping (e.g., SOAP to REST), versioning, and credential mediation. There is also an Eclipse-based development environment for custom transformations and policies. In addition, there is code-free configuration of transformations and policy application via a Web-based console. This allows for the sharing of data across applications.

Fourth, the ServiceNet appliance employs hardware acceleration to deliver networking-level throughput, providing scalability and performance to help meet SLAs with fault and traffic management and load balancing. There is network-appliance architecture for high scalability and availability. Here is a screen shot of Sonoa Control Center for operators to configure policies on services (security, audit, SLA, transformations, etc.).

One use case is a major financial service firm that wants to accelerate customer access to revenue generating web services. At the same time they need to ensure they are staying within banking regulations. IBM ships Sonoa ServiceNet with their rmashup server product to enhance its performance and policy monitoring. Sonoa clients include JP Morgan Chase, Pfizer, and Warner Music. Scott said that like many other enterprise 2.0 and cloud vendors, they are not being affected negatively by the recent economic downturn as they offer a way to manage and enhance cost reductions. This is good news and I can see an increasing need for their services in today’s IT market. Here is a short video demo of the analytics product from the Sonoa website.

January 27, 2009

Dan Schawbel wrote an excellent post on Mashable on the Top 10 Reputation Tracking Tools Worth Paying For. I have reviewed one of them on the AppGap – see Radian6 – Monitoring Social Media. You can find Dan’s view of Radian6 and 9 others through the above post. I list the complete ten below in this cross-post from AppGap with a very brief summary of what Dan wrote. See Dan’s post for much more useful detail.

Buzzlogic offers “BuzzLogic Insights” application. They let you know whose blogging about you and allow you to share this data within your company. They target two groups: marketers and PR people.

Radian6 lets you setup keywords to monitor on all forms of social media including blogs, top video and image sharing sites, forums, opinion sites, mainstream online media and Twitter.

Trackur offers a key word monitoring plan for individuals, companies, enterprises, and agencies. Trackur was “built by one of the leading experts in reputation management, Andy Beal” who was was also a case study in my business blog book.

Brands Eye offers reputation management packages for bloggers ($1 per month), small businesses, and enterprises. It tracks every online mention of your brand, giving you a score that reflects the state of your reputation over time.

Reputation Defender offers four different services: Internet references of your child or youself, ability to remove your personal information from people search databases, and a solution for owning your Google results.

Sentiment Metrics helps you monitor what is being said about you, your brand and your products across blogs, forums and news sites. It tells you if the mention is positive, negative or neutral.

Visible Technologies offers TruCast, a comprehensive solution for social media analysis and participation used by enterprises and TruView which protects and promotes reputations online.

Cision claims to monitor over 100 million blogs, tens of thousands of online forums, and over 450 leading rich media sites. Their service is powered by Radian6.

It is important to monitor your online reputation and what others are saying, both good and bad. You should at least use Google Alerts, which is free. However, I frequently learn many things through Google Alerts about other people who share my name or worse people who only share my first or last name, or even worse, things like legislative bills. However, there are times I find very useful mentions that I would not have known about otherwise such as Lilia Efimova’s study of bloggers on Mathemagenic. If you want more and are willing to pay for it, try some of the above.

January 26, 2009

Here is a free enterprise 2.0 tool that is focused on the average business user. It is not a heavy duty project management application or something for the consumer web. It is designed for the typical business person who is juggling ten to fifteen things at once. Many people, myself included, use pen and paper to keep track of stuff. Some use email folders but these are disconnected. With Manymoon you can manage your own tasks and projects and also assign and share them with others and get activity updates. It can work within and across companies. The name comes from the observation that some people have used phases of the moon to track various aspects their lives. You can use Manymoon to track and manage your work life.

I spoke with Amit Kulkarni Co-Founder and CEO of Manymoon. They are located in San Francisco with offices in Union Square, lucky them. Amit said that Manymoon is designed to avoid the chaos of email. It is a social productivity tool that allows business people to share information (e.g., tasks, status updates, projects) with their connections (e.g., co-workers, partners and customers) in secure workspaces with control over access. The current version is free. They plan to offer an enterprise version on a subscription basis soon but will always also offer a free version. It is a SaaS application.

Amit walked me through the application. There are five major components: your bulletin, your project, your tasks, your documents and your connections. Everyone that you work with becomes a connection. This allows you to build a skilled based contact list that you can leverage at a later time on projects and tasks. The bulletin lets you see what is currently going on across your projects and tasks. You can see an example below. The bulletin looks a lot like the LinkedIn activity or the Facebook feed where you can view at a glance all the activity across all your projects, tasks and connections.

If you look in the upper right corner of the screen you will see a box with the question, “What are you working on?” This is a Twitter like micro-messaging feature. I really like that it is not a standalone application but integrated into the Manymoon platform. So you can tie it to tasks or projects and use the built-in permission levels and also have the security needed for an enterprise application. Messages occur within the context of your other work. Here is a screen shot of the micro-messaging window. You can see that you can limit who sees the message or you can share it with everyone. This can eliminate unnecessary email, IM and phone exchanges with colleagues to find out what they are working on.

The next function is tasks. Here you get a view of all your tasks across all projects. You can filter them by due date (today, this week, this month, overdue) and other priorities. You can set email notifications for yourself and others. It is also integrated with Google calendar. There is an email-to-task creation capability. You can forward any of your emails to task@manymoon.com and they will automatically be converted into a private task for yourself. The task page is seen below.

The next function is a page that organizes your work around projects. You can get an overview of all your projects and then drill down to the project home page for more details. The project page has the same four tabs (bulletin, tasks, projects, and documents) but now they are project centric, instead of person centric. I like the consistency of interface. You can also see the project team members and add new ones. You can rearrange the order of your projects through drag and drop. Here is a sample project page for an individual.

Manymoon also allows you to upload documents and attach them to tasks or projects. This works through Google Docs but Manymoon gives them extra context. In the upcoming enterprise version they plan to allow for uploads independent of Google Docs. Here is a sample document page.

You can see through these four views a consistency and simplicity of interface design. I think this can be the tipping point in using a tool like this. I have experienced some other tools that frustrated non-technical users and/or made the bar to high for them to get involved. Amit said they spent a lot of time on user testing to get to the current interface design and it shows. I think this simplicity may be a greater differentiator for applications in this class than features, as long as they cover the basics in a transparent enterprise 2.0 manner. Manymoon accomplishes this. It is listed on the Google Solutions Marketplace and has acquired some excellent customer reviews.

Manymoon has been in private beta for some time. They provide some examples of how the tool is being used base don this beta. I am always glad to see more enterprise 2.0 use cases so here are a few that have a social aspect.

An office manager has been using Manymoon to track and close the various tasks that all his co-workers have been assigning to him. They include: organizing an off-site meeting (reserving rooms, renting a projector and easel, ordering lunch) and preparing for an email campaign (get the list of recipients, get graphics from the designer, sign-off from the CEO).

A C-level executive is using Manymoon to gain visibility into and track the action items from a strategy meeting. He has setup a project called "Q1 Operational Plan" where revenue tasks have been assigned to Sales, lead generation tasks have been assigned to Marketing and product delivery tasks have been assigned to Engineering.

A sales executive goes through the same 15-20 tasks with each potential customer to ensure a consistent process. He uses Manymoon to setup a project for each customer and share it with internal team-members. This allows his internal team to help complete the tasks and also provides sales management with detailed visibility into each sales opportunity. Some of the tasks include: develop presentation, gather customer requirements, present to customer, send data sheet to customer, demo to customer and send quote to customer.

A customer who has a project out for bid has been using Manymoon to track the engagement with multiple vendors. The customer can now quickly view the status of each vendor engagement and comment appropriately. There's a project assigned to each vendor and the customer can now securely track tasks (vendor sends the quote, vendor send the data sheet, he reviews the design, etc.).

I think Manymoon is a welcome addition to the enterprise 2.0 space. I like the mix of ease of use and sufficient functionality in a secure, but transparent, platform. It will be interesting to see how it evolves with its upcoming enterprise version. They have just released Manymoon Pro: it adds 3 GB of storage and SSL encryption for a small monthly fee.

January 25, 2009

Here is more on Detroit restaurants from Stan Garfield. He writes that MAGIC JOHNSON - is the acronym for remembering the good categories of restaurants in Detroit. Looks good to me. I loved the photo links at the bottom. Magic grew up not too far away in the Lansing MI area and played college ball there at Michigan State. Even though the Celts Beat LA last year we can honor his greatness. After all the Pistons did it also with team work.

January 24, 2009

I was listening to NPR in the car the other day and heard about the Monkey See blog. It covers “popular culture — the good and the bad; the high and the low. We aspire to be a haven for the geek and a translator for the confused, and to carve out a space where both longtime residents and curious visitors can comfortably roam the pop-culture landscape.” There is a lot on television. The writer is Linda Holmes who has been a pop-culture writer for more than 10 years.

Linda had a little movie-review site at one time. She has written about movies, books and television at MSNBC.com and was a longtime writer and editor at Television Without Pity. Linda said she once interviewed Donald Trump for TV Guide, and intends to be buried with my minicassette of him asking, "Hello, Linda, how-a you?"

January 23, 2009

It is nice to see that blogs have made it out of the infamous Gartner trough of disillusionment and are now leading the pack of social software as the sole member that has crossed into the slope of enlightenment. Blogs have always been a ground-breaker for social media so I pleased to see this trend continue. This relative placement for blogs was reported in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Social Software, 2008. Ironically, I found this report through a comment on a post about Twitter, Will 2009 be the year of Twitter? by Matt Rhodes. According to the same report, Twitter is about to crest at the top of the peak of inflated expectations.

The report says, “Blogs are pervasive. Google, Yahoo, Six Apart and MSN, among others, have blogging platforms, and publishers have begun to monetize blogs. While some press reports have characterized the blogging trend as having peaked, this perspective ignores the number of new users coming on the Web every day, more than a few of which will be utilizing blogs. It is now commonplace for CEOs and company executives to post regularly to their blogs; companies such as Yahoo or Google frequently announce new product betas on their blogs.” Good for them.

More importantly, it goes on to say, “Blogs have grown from a novelty to a mainstream platform for content distribution. Therefore, it is time to align IT and business forces to develop a blogging strategy for corporate and public-facing opportunities. Enterprises must define clear strategic objectives for blogging, and support them with policies to encourage executives and employees to maintain regular entries and to identify and discourage harmful blogging practices… Increasingly, any public-facing media company or enterprise must have a blogging strategy.”

I remember that when I first started this blog in May 2004 that was not the case. Blogs for business were a novelty and mainstream media was at war with blogs. Then 2005 marked the beginning of recognition for the business blog. Fortune Magazine named blogging in the top ten business technology trends for 2005, and the Harvard Business Review included business blogs in their list of breakthrough ideas for 2005. Blogs also made the over of Business Week in 2005.

However, I think they did not become pervasive until 2007. At least, this was when I started to get real interest in my business blog consulting. The interest only increased through 2008. While 2009 may be the year of Twitter, I think it will be more like 2005 was for business blogs. It will take a year or two longer to see if micro-blogging or micro-messaging becomes as firmly established as blogs. The Gartner report expressed similar feelings. Meanwhile, I hope that 2009 will also be another year for business blogs. There is still a place for messages longer than 140 characters.

January 22, 2009

I have written about the Obama campaign a number of times on this blog see for example, Update from the Obama Answer Center - Web 2.0 and US Elections. I wrote in this post, “that it will be great if the US government adopts these practices to better connect with citizens. Perhaps lessons learned during the campaign on such issues as effective web practices to increase citizen engagement can be adopted by the government. There is great potential here. I think it is demonstrates some of the ways the new web can be used to increase engagement and the innovation evidenced by this campaign.”

I am very pleased that the first blog post, Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov, went up on the new White blog even before the official oath of office and there is a Director of New Media for the White House, Macon Phillips who wrote the post. He said that the initial new media efforts will center around three priorities:

“Communication -- This site will feature timely and in-depth content meant to keep everyone up-to-date and educated. Check out the briefing room, keep tabs on the blog (RSS feed) and take a moment to sign up for e-mail updates…

Transparency -- The President's executive orders and proclamations will be published for everyone to review, and that’s just the beginning...

Participation -- Citizen participation will be a priority for the Administration, and the internet will play an important role in that…” There is a link to a form for providing input.

Macon said that they would put up the video and the full text of President Obama’s Inaugural Address. I look forward to hearing more. Blogs have come a long way since 2004. I hope that this is the case for our government as some of the principles of the new web of transparency and participation appear to be adopted. I was pleased to add this blog to my list.

January 21, 2009

I took a look at Google Analytics to see what posts people were looking at on this blog in 2008. It seems to get the best data. The top two destinations were the home page to no surprise but I was pleased that the average time on site for people who came first to the home page was 6 minutes, 45 seconds. Thanks to everyone who visited this past year.

Here are the next ten destinations with their year of posting. These are not necessarily what I consider the best work I did but since 64% of new traffic to this blog comes through search engines, these are the ones that appealed most to the dual audiences of people and search. All of them but one were in the top three results for Google searches on the relevant phrase and the other was fourth.

A bit over 21% of visits to this blog are from referrals so perhaps the older ones have been around long to pick up more links. People did seem to stick around and read them as the time on page varied between 4 minutes 54 seconds and 2 minutes 17 seconds on these posts with the average over 3 minutes.

They are all individual posts except for the restaurant pick index. I like the variety here as some are about knowledge management, some cover web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0, and some are on weekend topics. The one on Newport jazz festival has attracted a lot of comments. I learned much more about this event I attended and I wrote a post about some of these stories, Early Newport Jazz Festivals Relived in 2007.

The number of page views ranged from 1.423 to 712 and the number of unique visits ranged from 965 to 590. This list also shows the asynchronous nature of blog traffic as the posts were put up from 2004 to 2008 but this is just the 2008 traffic.

These results do not accurately represent the actual readers as around 2500 people subscribe to this blog. These subscribers likely simply read the RSS feed, if they read a post at all, since I put the whole post in it. If they did click through to the blog then they do show up in these results. However, I think these results are biased to new readers and not regular subscribers.

January 20, 2009

While I understand that technically speaking YouTube shows mostly short-form amateur videos and Hulu and other similar sites show long-form professional videos – mostly TV shows and movies, I am trying to determine how to briefly convey this distinction.

At TVissimo, the television and online video search engine I am involved with, we are not only indexing TV broadcast schedules but also online video sites such as TidalTV (Completed), Hulu (coming shortly) and others. When we say that we are offering a unified search capability for online videos and scheduled TV, people say – oh, you going to also show content from YouTube. Well, actually we are not planning to index YouTube, as it already has a good search function and content that is indexed differently from the videos we focus on.

We enable finding “topical” videos (TV shows and movies generally described in a “topical fashion”, namely a Seinfeld episode, a movie with Dustin Hoffman or a segment from the Olympics. We will offer access to similar content from other sites, namely movies and TV shows.

These videos are different from “scene” oriented videos of YouTube, where, among many other things, you can search for and find a video with scenes such as a “cat chasing a mechanical mouse”. These scenes may actually be segments of TV shows or movies, but the focus is on the individual scene, as opposed to the entire episode or program. Of course, YouTube has many other functions but showing whole segments of TV programs is not one.

So what do you think? I would greatly appreciate suggestions. YouTube is a social medium and TV and Hulu are not social media. This is certainly one difference. Now I also asked this question on my Twitter feed so I will be interested to see which media, blogs (my Portals and KM blog and the TVissimo blog) or Twitter (my Twitter feed and the Tvissimo one) gets the most, if any, response

January 19, 2009

I have written about iTKO before See - iTKO LISA - Software Validation and Testing at the Speed of Enterprise 2.0. iTKO LISA provides SOA testing and validation services that are designed to meet the challenges of the new world of enterprise 2.0 and agile development. I recently had a chance to talk with them again and spoke with John Michelsen, iTKO’s Founder/Chief Geek; and Chris Kraus, iTKO LISA Product Manager. We covered two main areas of expansion for them: SOA governance and service virtualization.

SOA governance has evolved to include more than setting policies, as a number of vendors now have software offerings in this space. They tend to be standalone applications that put SOA governance policy into software in the form of specifying what needs to be done (i.e. “the system shall…”) and offering content repositories for recording governance decisions and policies.

This is helpful, but Chris said more functionality should be provided for better adaption to the rapidly changing world of SOA application development today. Most of these SOA governance tools are not actionable. With LISA, they have integrated governance vendors’ policies to launch their testing and validation services, so the policies can guide automated testing procedures.

This integration of governance policies is especially important in the dynamic world of agile development, with a constantly shifting development environment. In the old waterfall method, you could assume some stability and the pace was a bit slower. Now every new business solution that consumes services necessitates a testable event. Governance policies need to be more complex as a result and be able to adapt to these changes. The manual step of taking policies out of SOA governance content repositories and validating and enforcing them in the real world slows things down, and sets up space for errors and the need for even more testing. Automated policy application through integration with the testing tools takes these manual steps out of the application life cycle.

We spent a bit more time on service virtualization (SV). iTKO has a very useful white paper on this topic and I took some of the explanations from this work. This is a great area for cost reduction and it is gaining a lot of press. iTKO defines virtualization as the practice of simulating the behavior of a physical asset, such as a server or application, in a software emulator, and hosting that emulator in a virtual environment. The virtual environment behaves enough like the physical environment, that communication with the emulated asset is identical to the real thing. The same concept of virtualization can be applied to hardware and software.

Hardware virtualization creates simulators of hardware behavior, but they are actually intelligent proxies to the physical world. These proxies have the ability to negotiate with the virtual environment in which they are deployed, so they do not require exclusive access to the hardware they represent offering more flexibility. Hardware virtualization has generated a lot of buzz for the realized cost savings.

However, hardware virtualization is limited to virtualizing what actually exists. iTKO takes the concept a step further with service virtualization. Here you can virtualize the behavior of services even before they are developed. What you can virtualize is greatly expanded. Service virtualization can greatly reduce the dependencies between development and QA, and between the core service provider and the business solution service consumer. One team does not have to wait on the other, and the team on the front end of a development cycle has to do less to help those on the back end. It is a win-win. Here is a sceen shot that shows how LISA Virtualize models user and system-to-system decision points throughought the transaction workflow, and captures all needed data according to its relevance to business logic.

In the past, a development team would have to create a mock up to help QA get started, but it was limited as to what might be tested. Core infrastructure service developers would have to create mockups so the business solution developers who relied on these services could begin their work. It took time to create these mockups. More importantly, they had limited value to the business solution service consumers because they were limited in what they could do. Sometimes they were not even used at all.

With service virtualization these steps can be automated. Development teams might save 20 to 30 percent of their effort by not having to do these mockups. More importantly business solution developers can start their work in a robust way months ahead of old schedules since they can obtain a virtualization of all of the behavior of the service under development. You get something that looks and acts like the real thing instead of its shadow. Here the potential savings are exponential. Below is a diagram that shows the before and after of service virtualization.

This seems transformational to me. Chris mentioned that one client was able to do in days what a seven person team was formerly doing in over a year. To be clear, with service virtualization you do not get the actual application that can do real transactions, but you do get a virtualization of that application that looks and acts exactly like this application for testing purposes, and can be modeled to suit the functional, data and performance responsiveness levels needed, long before the actual application is built.

Here are some specific examples of how this service virtualization can help from their white paper.

• Let’s say you need access to a mainframe, but the trouble is you are not the only team with this need, there are dozens of other project teams -- so you have very infrequent access to the mainframe, slowing down development.

• Let’s say you need access to a database, but another team owns the database. You need new stored procedures in that database schema, but it will take some 3 or 4 months of negotiating and design work to produce those stored procedures.

• Let’s say you need access to a web service because there is a new architectural mandate to access legacy systems through web services. However, the proposed web service doesn’t actually exist yet. You company is still shopping the contract, so access is months away.

Service virtualization can eliminate these constraints. For mainframe access, you can build a model of the behavior, and then host it as a virtual service in a virtual service environment. For database access, you can construct a model from the database and make changes as needed within minutes. For web access, you can construct a virtual service from SOAP documents or XML samples, or whatever you can give the Virtualization team.

In a former life, I did enterprise software training, and we were even further down the development lifecycle than testing. There was usually an impossibly short window when the software was ready so we could start to develop the training when it was needed. I wish we had service virtualization then. It would have transformed our ability to have training ready on time. Chris said that some of their customers are using service virtualization for training purposes.

When I wrote my first post on ITKO last year, I titled it Software Validation and Testing at the Speed of Enterprise 2.0. It seems that iTKO has further revived up the speed with these expansions. It is providing an important component to realizing the vision of enterprise 2.0 that is often overlooked. Their blog, iTKO LISA SoapBox, offers a lot of useful conceptual pieces on these issues.

January 18, 2009

My friend Karen D’Amico, a London artist, sent me the link to Photology. It has wonderful photos of old cars, trucks, boats, other vintage stuff, along with flowers. The photos of vintage stuff remind me a bit of Walker Evans. The flowers seem like Man Ray doing a better job on Georgia O’Keefe images. Anyway they are enjoyable in their own right.

Karen also sent me a link to Abandoned Places by Henk van Rensbergen. It takes theme of abandoned images found in Photology and goes a lot further. The site says, “Old buildings, abandoned hospitals, industrial palaces overgrown with plants and trees, the remaining walls decorated with graffiti, smashed windows, rain dripping through the roof... These places have become hard to find, difficult (or illegal) to access, dangerous to explore ... great to spend the day !” He updates the site with new images. The most recent was of Château de Noisy, “a sort of Disneyland castle after 30 years of abandonment.”

January 16, 2009

Here is a post by Chris Aarons, Social Media For The Masses, that I appreciate. Chris starts with this, “As the number of social networkers and Twitter-ers continues to grow, advertisers and marketers often find themselves employing tactics such as setting up a “Fan-page” on Facebook, posting tweets on Twitter or developing applications to attract consumers to their brand. But all of these tactics ignore a critical player in the online marketing game—blogs.”

I agree. He goes on to say that blogs play a bigger and more important role for marketers than ever before. A blog can be the foundation for a social media marketing campaign. Then you can use other channels like twitter and email newsletters, as well as forum to focus attention to the blog. Twitter can only offer sound bytes while a blog can provide the complete message. It is hard to establish a thought leadership position with Twitter or even a forum but blogs are built for this.

Chris gives some stats to support blog use including the finding that blogs had almost twice as many unique visits as Facebook. I found this data and some more in the 2008 Technorati report on the blogosphere. About 50 to 75% of US web users read blogs. The same report mentioned that 71%of survey respondents feel that blogs are getting taken more seriously as sources of information. Half feel that more people will get their news from blogs than traditional media in the next five years and blogs are just as valid sources as traditional media. The report also said that bloggers are more likely to be enticed to learn more about a product by other blogs than any other source.

Chris mentions four components to blog’s power: consumer generated content, third party validation, social media and search results. Chris said that reaching influencial bloggers can often be a better way to get noticed in social networking sites such as Facebook than going there directly yourself. On the last component, Chris noted that blogs stand for “better listings on Google” which is very true. There is both an art and science to achieving these results.

I would add that blogs give you more control over your message will allowing for input by others. So here comes the commercial – if you need help with your marketing blogs, let me know.

January 15, 2009

I have now had a chance to read, YouTube: An Insider's Guide to Climbing the Charts. Thanks to O’Reilly for the review copy. The book is very comprehensive, including great coverage of all the technical video stuff. I see the above blog post title as an endorsement, not a criticism. One thing that stands out is that YouTube success requires a lot of work. This should be no surprise as this is an artistic medium. The book focus more on YouTube as an art channel than YouTube as a news or marketing channel but the lessons apply to all uses.

Any artist will tell you that you need to pay your dues and obtain basic competence in your medium before being able to accomplish artistic depth. This applies to both visual and literary arts. I would not be surprised to see courses on YouTube in art colleges than cover video and/or the web. In these cases, this book should be on the reading list.

The book covers how to succeed in storytelling and directing, shooting, editing, and rendering, creating your very own channel, broadcasting user-generated content, re-broadcasting commercial content, handling music, cultivating a devoted audience, fitting into the YouTube community, among other things.

The book was written by YouTube veterans Alan Lastufka and Michael W. Dean and includes a lot of their personal experience. It also has interviews with YouTube stars LisaNova, Hank Green (vlogbrothers), WhatTheBuckShow, nalts, and liamkylesullivan. There are a lot of links to great YouTube clips.

There is also a nice chapter on using other social media to promote your YouTube efforts. You can use blogs for simple promotion but starting a community invites more engagement by your audience. It is interesting how people build communities around all types of interests, YouTube simply being a more recent example. I remember reviewing a documentary on BBQ competitions and the community around these events. There were always those who put in the extra effort and they were usually the winners.

Michael Dean provides a chapter on time management to help with the effort issue. He noted that he wrote that chapter while waiting in his doctor’s office. Ironically, I am writing this review at my doctor’s waiting room and can appreciate his approach.

I liked the background on Hollywood movies and how YouTube differs. It gave me a better understanding of treatments and techniques in both media. In both cases, conflict is the essence of drama. The sequence is similar to what I learned in building sales pitches in PowerPoint. Define a situation, introduce a complication, and then offer a resolution. In this case, whatever you are selling without this sequence there is no story or focus and people lose interest.

So if you want to be a YouTube star, this book is required reading. It will either excite you or test your commitment by pointing out all that needs to be done. In the end all the competence will still need an artistic vision. Skills are certainly necessary but not sufficient. Good luck and I hope to see you on YouTube. If you have some favorite clips, either yours or others, please leave them in the comments to this post. I am a sponge for these.

January 14, 2009

Future Changes has a series on blogs to watch in 2009. One was the AppGap, the group blog I am pleased to be involved with. The post said that AppGap is: “A blog about the future of work and the role new tools play in addressing age-old problems. It’s sponsored by Intuit and built by an excellent little company called Beeline Labs. Here’s what makes it great: it’s written by a group of contributors, most of whom are not employees of Intuit. That makes the blog a great example of what Rick Burnes calls a corporate blog worth reading because it’s “attracting a broad audience by focusing on content that is interesting to the demographic it serves rather than content about the products it sells.”

Stewart Mader, the author of Future Changes blog is also the author of the books Wikipatterns and Using Wiki in Education. I really liked Wikipatterns and did a four part review starting with Wikipatterns Comments - Part One - Wiki Uses. I have had three of the other eleven blogs he wants us to watch in 2009 blong on my blog roll. Some of the others are new and may soon in the list along with Future Changes.

January 13, 2009

Dean Takahash at Venture beat shared a summary of a recent Deloitte survey on the state of media. The report concludes that, “We’re living in a media democracy, where no single form of media dominates the attention of Americans. It’s also an age where everyone contributes to the media, not just traditional media companies.” The last part is old news but I found the first part more interesting.

There has been discussion about whether blogging will continue in the age of Twitter. I have mentioned, as have others, that they have different functions and complement each other. Twitter may take away a few of the functions of blogs but there are many left that cannot be handled by Twitter.

There has been very few times where a new media actually completely replaces an old one. Each new advance in communication expands the possibilities for knowledge capture and distribution. It usually takes a while to fully understand the possibilities and the requirements to enable them. Take text or writing for example: the invention of the phonetic alphabet around 700 B.C. made enabled a number of unforeseen and unintended capabilities.

In the pre-writing oral tradition, the conditions for the preservation of ideas were mnemonic. To promote memory, instruction and knowledge preservation made use of verbal and musical rhythms; however, these rhythms placed severe limits on the verbal arrangement of what was said, as in Homer, and the need to memorize used up cognitive energy that otherwise could have been devoted to learning. Because of the heavy memory load, the epic poets did not actually memorize content verbatim; they created new versions from a set of possibilities as they went along.

The concept of an original version that could be preserved did not evolve until after written text. This was critical to the development of modern science and essential for many forms of instruction. In many ways, the epic poets, chief knowledge distributors of their day, made up the details as they went along. Text made available a visual record of thought, abolishing the need for an acoustic record and hence the need for rhythms. Greek thought changed and such works as Plato’s “Republic” are described by some scholars as an attack on the oral poetic tradition of knowledge distribution (see Eric Havelock’s “Origins of Western Literacy” or his better known “Preface to Plato”).

However, the invention of text did not replace poetry, it just reduced the content it covered to what was more appropriate for the media. I think the same thing will happen with Twitter and blogs.

Returning to the present, the Deloitte study, Ed Moran, director of product innovation at Deloitte Services said, “A lot of media will coexist…We won’t see a massive extinction.” Looking across all generations, television remains the most influential ad medium for 88 percent of respondents. Magazines (49 percent) and online (48 percent) tied for second. Radio remained influential for 27 percent of the respondents. Only 5 percent — mostly millennials — considered cell phone ads to be the most influential. Roughly 70 percent of all consumers are watching user-generated videos. YouTube is no longer just a fad. Google must be pleased with their purchase.

January 12, 2009

I found these blog through a post by Chris Brogan’s post on What Facebook Fan Pages Taught Me About Relationships. Here he talks about the “problem” of reaching the 5000 friend Facebook limit and having to start a fan page. It seems that 5000 friends is an oxymoron and a fan page is more appropriate at that level.

I found a solution for Chris and those who are approaching the 5000 friend limit. Burger King has a promotion offering Facbook users a free Whopper (value: about $3.70) if they delete 10 of their friends. See the NYT - The Value of a Facebook Friend? About 37 Cents. Your friends can get you into the growing group of over weight Americans. I once read that it takes six glasses of a good Bordeaux to counter the cholesterol in a Whopper or Big Mac. perhaps it they throw that in...

Anyway, I was more interested in learning about some top blogs that cover Facebook. Here they are:

Inside Facebook is an independent blog based in Palo Alto, California, focusing on Facebook and the Facebook Platform for developers and marketers. Inside Facebook was started by Justin Smith in April 2006 as the first blog focused on tracking Facebook and the Facebook economy. In 2007, he wrote the Facebook Marketing Bible, the most widely referenced book on Facebook marketing today.

Why Facebook is written by Mari Smith with sub title, social networking for fun and profits. There was no shortage of self promotion here. I learned about the Shorty Awards that honors the best producers of short (140 characters or less, on Twitter) content in 2008. There are many categories (e.g., sports, news, food, personal photography weird). Mari was pushing her readers to vote for her. It is too late for the initial tally as the initial round of voting, which will last until midnight December 31,

However, as Tech Crunch writes the “five Tweeters with the most nominations in each category will take part in a final round between January 5th and 14th. An awards ceremony will be held in New York in late January, where the winners of the “most important categories” (the site doesn’t say what qualifies as important) will be able to deliver acceptance speeches in person or via video in 140 characters or less.”

How do they say this with a straight face? What is next? Perhaps the Oscars should adopt this principle to avoid overly long acceptance speeches, as our attention spans get shorter.

January 11, 2009

I have written about my friend’s blog before – see Fluid Thinking – Karen D’Amico’s Artist Blog – but I have not covered her graphic design and art so here are some thoughts. She has a new site for her graphic design work, D’Amico Design. I think the entry page is a great example of focus as there is an interesting image that takes a minute to figure out and then a simple objective statement below that draws your eye after seeing the banner.

The “about section” covers her 18 years in the design and print industry including Karen’s technical and design capabilities, as well as her services. She also mentions that she is a practicing artist, and maintains a studio in Hackney. I certainly agree with Karen’s statement, “I like the fact that the boundaries between fine art and design are often blurred. I consider both professions to be innately creative, requiring lateral thinking and the ability to find unique solutions.” Too often fine art looks down on design work. I see them as peers and the ability to create just the right simplicity required to convey a message through good design is something I have great respect for.

In Karen’s portfolio I especially like the Glitter and Grime series in Portfolio One. It is design for an artist’s book with many street scenes. Karen said she had complete autonomy on the design effort. I think the text and the illustrations work as equals with neither fighting the other. I also like the design work in her own ezine, Tangent Projects, seen in Portfolio Three. Here you also see a balanced relationship between text and images. The art of occupation invitation makes a strong conceptual statement and then you notice the balanced design that drew your attention to the conceptual centerpiece.

Karen’s art site contains the statement that her “art practice focuses on the devising of various groupings and systems as agencies of connecting and interpreting notions surrounding identity/legacy, accumulated histories, and sense of place. By incorporating maps, text, assemblage and the photographic image in her work, she juxtaposes and manipulates objects and images in an attempt to order, contain and re-present them in various contexts.”

One project that conveys this message is the collaborative Travellers Secret Box 2005- 2007. It “sought to explore, locate, identify and perhaps dissolve some of the seemingly undetectable territories existent in terms of art and culture, social inclusion and the ever-shifting locality of identity as well as notions of home.” In 2008 this concept was extended to the Sandwich Box, another group effort that Karen is the co-curator. Karen often works at boundaries and her champagne army is another wonderful example I wrote about before. I find her work a nice balance of accessibility and complexity.

The images section presents a wide variety of work. I was struck by “Outpouring,” a mixed media work; “burnt offerings,” an assemblage; “time trap,” another assemblage; “no such place,” a digitally manipulated photograph that looks like an aerial image but is really a micro-world. There are many others but I will stop here and recommend that you take a look.

January 10, 2009

I wrote about my friend Liz Sweibel’s work and recent exhibit, see - Many Kinds of Nothing Creates a Nice Art Space. The site organizes her work into three galleries that show pieces that work together. I especially liked the interiors series in gallery two. They are mixed media collages. I liked the simplicity and stark presentation. These interiors reminded me of some of the interior images of the contemporary Spanish painter, Antonio López García, who I greatly admire. It is not a literal comparison as the work by Liz is on a very small scale (e.g., 1.5" x 1.25") and this is part of their appeal. Lopez Garcia does super realism on a large scale. It is rather the feeling that each evoke, one that is hard to put into words in each case.

Liz also provides a play section that offers her more experimental work, as well as a statement and more background. The statement concludes, “My work uses modest materials, simple gestures, and its slight presence to cultivate space and slow time. I hope for it to be a quiet yet persistent call for attention, an invitation to stop and experience the nuances of the moment, and to realize that there is much to cherish and much we can do better.” I think she achieves this goal with her work.

On the site you can click on an image to get a bigger view and then click again to get an even bigger view. She links to her Flickr photo stream for some nice images. You can also join her email list.

Liz has started a blog that seems mostly devoted to her art. I especially liked the post, "But the Visual Is Not Reducible to the Verbal." This is an issue I have had a life long interest in as both an artist and a cognitive psychologist. Liz starts with her efforts to categorize her work, a task that requires using words to describe the visual, a cross-media task. She concludes the post, “As someone who's made a living from words for 30 years, this dilemma is actually exhilarating. It's always been my need to make work that exceeds (if not precedes) words, to get at something beyond (if not before) our brains' capacity to reduce it to the verbal.”

"To go on from here I can't use words, they don't say enough." is a line from one of my favorite Jefferson Airplane songs, Today. I agree with this much more than the Bee Gees lyrics, "words are all i have to..." I think that words work best at the intersection of symbols, the words, and thought. The symbols have no intrinsic meaning, only the thoughts we share. It is words that push your thought to new places that are most effective. This is even more true for visual images. I think that Liz's work achieves this goal.

January 09, 2009

I get these emails from ADP from time to time. I find them interesting so I do not object. I was especially struck with the last one. According to ADP’s Small Business Report small-size businesses (50 employees are less) lost 281,000 jobs in December, the largest decline in small-size business employment recorded by the ADP Small Business Report since the beginning of the ADP National Employment Report dataset in December 2000.

The ADP Small Business Report is a subset of the ADP National Employment Report:

Total small business employment: -281,000

Goods-producing sector: -80,000 small business jobs

Service-providing sector: -201,000 small business jobs

The Report's data is taken from a sample of 400,000 payrolls, covering 24 million employees in all major private industries and regions. Of course they do this as a service to help sell their payroll solutions, nothing wrong with that.

My payroll is pretty simple and only requires a pen and my checkbook. The largest member of my payroll, after me, is the federal government, followed by the state government. Sometimes, I think I am falling behind my other “employees” in wages. Now if the paychecks I write go to help other Americans get jobs, especially to reverse the numbers in the small business sector, I will feel much better about these other two employees I have, especially since I cannot fire them. I am not being partisan in my politics here as I hope that both parties find the wisdom to put my paychecks toward generating real work.

January 08, 2009

As the economy stays down it is nice to see that social media marketing, including blogs, is predicted to increase in 2009 according to Online Media Daily – see Social Media Wins In Marketers' '09 Plans. Marketers are directing their 2009 budgets toward content, custom media and social media initiatives, according to a new study from online marketing resource and vendor-matching tool Junta42. This is consistent with what I have heard from social vendors who say their revenues are holding strong also.

The study said that more than half (56%) of marketing and publishing decision-makers plan to increase their content marketing spending next year. In addition, 31% expressed their intention to increase spending on content significantly, while 25% said they planned to increase it slightly, only 4% of respondents said they planned to decrease spending on content dramatically next year, while 9% said they planned to decrease it slightly.

In terms of most important products/tactics, social media--other than blogs--resonated with 68% of subscribers, followed by e-newsletters/email (60%), blogs (56%), case studies (55%), online video (51%), white papers (46%) and microsites (43%). For the study, 42% of respondents were corporate marketers, 22% were traditional publishers/media, 19% were marketing/advertising agencies, 15% were custom publishers and 3% were association marketers. Within the surveyed audience, 85% make marketing purchase decisions for their organizations.

Now for the commercial: If you need help with your social media marketing in 2009, especially with market facing blogs, I would be glad to help out. Contact me at iveswilliam@comcast.net.

January 07, 2009

I am looking forward to Fast Forward 09 in Las Vegas, February 9 to 11 at the Mirage. I will be there with my fellow Fast Forward bloggers. We are certainly to going to blog the event, do video podcast interviews, and some other stuff. I hope to see you there and further the conversations on this blog and the Fast Forward blog.

Speakers include Charlene Li, Clay Shirky, Don Tapscott, Pekka Vijakalnen, and more. Elton John, Donnie and Marie, and a number of Beatles tribute bands will also be in town, along with a Frank and Barbra tribute concert. Do you need to know more?

The volcano at the Mirage is now active. You can see the video at their site, Mirage Volcano.

January 06, 2009

Here is the monthly listing of my Fast Forward blog posts. I find it helps me with an archive and hopefully is also useful to you. There is a separate category for these summaries in my right side column on this blog. There will be more in January.

Back to Mike’s stuff. It is excellent. He covered some topics should be considered when formulating Enterprise 2.0 plans. The first concerns Sharepoint. Mike writes that many people are using Sharepoint for “valid reasons unrelated to E2.0 and are "ok" with undertaking extensive customization or adding specific partners (e.g., NewsGator) to augment what SharePoint has in terms of E2.0 capabilities.” This is move is actually aligned with Sharepoint’s current strategy of linking to best of breed E 2.0 partners as many have written about. Mike appears to feel that they need to move beyond this reliance and writes that the next release will be a tipping point for Microsoft's social computing efforts.

He may likely be right and I look forward to what happens. In the meanwhile, if you want to use Sharepoint, there are many systems integrators thankful for the opportunity to help you and third party vendors ready to supplement Sharepoint. Many of these vendors first saw Sharepoint as a competitor and now see it as a platform to provide more space for their products (e.g. The Sharepoint Sessions Revisited – AIIM Seminar).

The third is interesting. He notes how many point vendors have expanded their products suites (e.g., blog platforms have wikis and visa versa and more). This is smart move on their part but Mike points out that it creates overlap issues. The movement is toward platforms and not point solutions. This will help to reduce content silos but it will also likely reduce the players.

There is much more and I will not repeat everything but recommend that you read the original. Mike closes with enterprise twitter as the space to watch and links to his Enterprise Versions Of Twitter. Here is a post, Enterprise Microblogging or Micromessaging, that links to some of my thoughts on the vendors and issues. I think that twitter functionality will follow the trend described by Mike and become part of a platform, rather than stay a separate function. However, there will remain room for some of the best standalone vendors.

In this case Sam talks about a photo he did for a Marlboro ad. Richard Prince, the so-called artist, took the image, stripped out the text and made an edition of two copies, selling them for several million dollars. Sam gave up rights to the ad agency when he did the photo. There is also some law that photos used in ads can be then used for other things. The ad agency has tried to sue William Prince unsuccessfully as he stole a number of their photos for his personal gain.

Sam’s picture was also on the cover of a Guggenheim Museum catalog giving Richard Prince credit for Sam’s photo. Sam pointed out that this was his work but his work would never appear in a major art museum because of the bias against photojournalism. Instead someone can copy his work, make millions off it, and have major museums display it. I think this is a dark moment for the Guggeheim. Richard Prince deserves a special place in artist hell for his exploitation. Now he is just reaping in in millions as you can see in this video about how he built a small village for himself. The idiots who paid millions for his work deserve a special place of honor as fools and they owe Sam a lot for his rightful work. Sam is rightfully amazed that Richard Prince can live with himself. Sam and I were taught that acts like this were immoral.

January 03, 2009

I have now provided restaurant picks by friends for an increasing number of cities and towns. I also do a few myself. This blog post serves as an index to them with links for easy access. I will continue to update this index as I add more places. It was time to update it as I last posted the index on June 08.

Why do I write about restaurant picks by friends when Zagat and other places have plenty of reviews for most cities? My reviews are by people I know and trust their tastes. I do not know the people in Zagat’s or Gourmet. etc. and I do not always agree with them even though I do use them as useful input. You just have to decide how much you trust me versus the “official” guides. I certainly do not pretend to be an expert but I also am not connected with any places or have an agenda except to give my opinion and those of people I trust. I just know what I like and the list is part of my personal knowledge management system. I often consult it myself went going on a holiday or business trip. I hope it helps you, also. Here is a post that explains it in more detail, Restaurant Reviews – Why I Blog Them. In this post I also show how I both agree and disagree with another ’official” reviewer, Gourmet Magazine.

January 02, 2009

Here are my App Gap posts for December. In addition to the Fast Forward blog (see side bar for links), I am writing in another Corante blog, the App Gap, sponsored by QuickBase, The posts began toward the end of January 2008. In this case, I am primarily doing product commentaries with a few other things thrown in. Below are the ones for December. There will be more in January.

January 01, 2009

Happy New Year. You knew this was going to happen. O’Reilly has come out with a book, YouTube: An Insider's Guide to Climbing the Charts. As the ad states, “if you want to be visible on YouTube or even go viral, then you've come to the right place.” It is written by YouTube veterans Alan "fallofautumndistro" Lastufka and Michael W. Dean and “provides easy-to-read instructions on getting a video of your cause, song, commercial, or unique point of view noticed by thousands.” The book includes interviews with YouTube stars LisaNova, Hank Green (vlogbrothers), WhatTheBuckShow, nalts, and liamkylesullivan, as well as current YouTube staff. I heard that Joe the Plumber is autographing copies.

The book covers how to succeed in storytelling and directing, shooting, editing, and rendering, creating your very own channel, broadcasting user-generated content, re-broadcasting commercial content, cultivating a devoted audience, fitting into the YouTube community, and becoming a success story. It is the next best thing to American Idol. Actually, I think the book will make interesting reading. I asked for review copy and they honored my request so you can see my review in coming weeks.

I wonder if they interview the Hey Clip producers. When I first wrote about them, their 3 minute lip synch video had 13,786.185 views (April 07). Recently the number had grown to 24,698,943 views and 54,289 ratings. Take a look, add to the total, and see a winning example. Their timeless piece is certainly doing better than the Bush – Blair duet at 41,446 views.